Imagine, if you will, a young Charles Perry sitting at bar near Texas Tech University in the spring of 1982. He’s a Baptist who wears his faith on a sleeve, but tonight he needs a break from studying so he decides to get a beer with the boys. Nothing to crazy, just a couple of beers to let off some steam. As he sits at the bar talking Texas Football and listening to Mac Davis howl “baby don’t get hooked on me,” a Mexican woman walks into the bar.

She is small in stature, but her cowboy boots give her an extra three inches. Her legs are muscular and cinnamon tan. She wears an acid washed jean jacket over a short black dress that looks so good it almost knocks Chuck of his bar stool.

The boys hadn’t seen her yet, or they’d hollering and whistling in a North Texas twang. So Charles makes it a point not to stare to hard so as to avoid drawing attention from the boys. He imagines her name to be Rosa, or Mari. Maybe she is a student too. We can take classes together and visit each other in the dorms. One day I will take her to meet my family. Hell she might be the one that makes me drop to one knee and ask for her hand.

He tries to be casual in his glances, but one of the boys notices her. They always do.They whistle at her and wave her over.

“Hey Mamacita, want some tequila?”

At that moment, some witnesses have claimed, that Charles Perry decides to defend her honor. He jumps off his bar stool. With a stern finger and voice which catches wind in his lungs and bellows out his throat, a technique he would later use at political rallies, Chuck warns the boys to back off.

“Don’t you boys go messing with that girl, you hear!”

He realizes two things; he can manipulate men that are worked into frenzy and his gallantry has garnered attention from the Mexican girl whose honor he defends. Perhaps it is his new found courage, perhaps it is the beer, but at that moment he feels unstoppable. He is John Wayne.

He walks up to Rosa, Margarita or whatever her name is and asks her to dance. “No,” she says with a Spanish accent so thick and heavy that it crushes and breaks something behind Chuck’s sternum.

He walks back to the boys at the bar.

“Your Maid shoot you down, Chuck?”

They rip on him like jackals on carcass.

Some say that a few years later Charles was driving through Concho County when a crossing guard, a large woman with red curly hair, stopped in front of his car, blew her whistle then held up the bright red stop sign. He squeezed his steering wheel and wanted to blast his horn. He was running late for his Public Accountant certification exam. When he looked up from the clock on his dashboard he saw Rosa, or Maritza, or whatever her name is, holding a little girls hand. The little girl wore a pink back-pack and she skipped alongside her mother and crossed the street to colorfully decorated cottages of Concho Counties only pre-k school, Concho Pre-K.

Seeing that woman took him back to the moment he first saw her, legs muscular and taught like a colt. He remembered the boys, which he hadn’t kept in touch with since graduation. As she walked past his car he wanted to wave, to say something, anything but he couldn’t. She walked by without noticing him.

Then the crossing guard’s whistle seared through his car window and she waved him to drive on.

“Keep it moving, Perv,” she said as Charles drove by.

From the rearview mirror he watched his Mexican girl shrink and fade away.